Microsoft rolled out a bunch of patches today for Windows 8, and the most important one is that Flash in IE10 now works with a blacklist instead of a whitelist. "Well, the biggest news is that Microsoft has enabled Flash to work now in Internet Explorer 10 for RT. If you recall, Microsoft only allowed a few, specific websites with Flash to work on Internet Explorer 10 citing performance and battery life reasons. There was even a neat little work around that you could do yourself to bypass this. Now, Microsoft have reversed that decision, which they say is due to more sites becoming IE10 compatible." There's a firmware update for Surface RT as well, and I have to admit my Surface RT feels a little faster and smoother - especially typing. Could be reboot-induced, though.

It's IE10 that needs to be compatible with websites that work fine with every other browser .. we don't want the 90's browser hell all over again...

Not quite. While they're not perfect, most of the compatibility issues I've seen in IE9 and 10 have been because of all the workarounds that people had to write for previous versions - as IE becomes more standards compliant, those workarounds start causing problems instead of fixing them.

Something tells me that the world has not gone out of its way to update its flash content to be compatible with Windows RT, and rather that MS realized that it made a stupid decision and decided to reverse it while (officially) saving face.

iOS didn't (still doesn't, and very likely will not) support Flash, everyone complained "so how do I watch videos on blah blah blah website!?", "how do I play Flash games blah blah blah!?". Few years later, Adobe announced that Flash player for Android 4.x (?) will be the last version and no more further development will be done. Everyone rejoice "whoa! yeah! bye bye Flash! no more power consumption monster!".

But how people react to the blocking policy of Flash content on IE? Before: "oh god I NEED FLASH to live! add ALL sites to the damn whitelist!" After: "heh, MSFT is trying to save face!"

People, do you really know what do you want? If you want to move away from Flash/ add-on world, then it is necessary to rewrite websites which make use of Flash/ other technologies rely on add-on, and you will have a native (HTML5/ JavaScript), faster and perhaps less power consuming implementation. Otherwise, keep using Flash, but don't, I mean DO NOT, complain a device/ browser is consuming your precious battery power or exposing another interface for attacks.

To me, MSFT changes the policy because (1) there are too many average joe who doesn't know Flash has many drawbacks (power consumption, security, etc.) and (2) there are tons of web developers who are too lazy to move away from Flash. I haven't check the blacklist in the update, but I would suggest put every website that has HTML5 version in the blacklist, so that it forces developers (and users?) to realize that there is a better implementation.

Something tells me that the world has not gone out of its way to update its flash content to be compatible with Windows RT, and rather that MS realized that it made a stupid decision and decided to reverse it while (officially) saving face.

Content providers will have to update their content for iOS based devices and modern Android hw anyway. Microsoft just pu**ied out and did the wrong thing. You can always count on MS to do the wrong thing.